Yesterday marked the first day of the new Financial Year, so HAPPY NEW YEAR to you!

The beginning of the new financial year is a good time to put on paper some new year’s resolutions for your business. The last few days have probably been spent frantically getting all of your end of year affairs in order, sorting our receipts, paying bills, updating your accounting software etc, but now you can take a breath, and start thinking about the next 12 months.

- Has your business performed the way you had hoped it would?
- Did you reach your financial goals for FY08?
- What were your biggest business challenges?

Take some time to sit down and contemplate your business, make some notes on what you have achieved, what goals you may have missed, what things you need to change to achieve your goals this financial year, and what you could have done differently.

Analyse how your time has been spent. Have you been making the best use of your time? Do you put a value on your time, so you can see how much it is costing you to work in your business? If you don’t, you should!

Once you’ve looked at where your time has been spent, work out what things you could have outsourced, so that you could better spend your own valuable time in other areas of your business. For example, how much time have you spent going through your receipts and entering them into your accounting software package? If you apply your own hourly rate to this time, you’ll see it was probably a very expensive exercise. Could you have saved some money if you’d used a bookkeeper instead? The answer is probably “YES”.

And how much time have you spent on things like:
- Database management
- Data entry
- Internet research
- Email marketing

Again, if you had outsourced these kinds of tasks, not only would it be more cost effective to your business, but you would have more of your own time to spend in other areas of your business that you can’t outsource. Like maintaining a relationship with your existing customer base!

Once you’ve worked out the areas that you could outsource to better utilise your time, give eSpire Solutions a call, and we’ll tell you how we can partner with you to take those tasks off your to-do list.